bitcoiner - Witness Update #7 - 2016-11-04steemCreated with Sketch.

Welcome to my weekly witness update. This is something I do every Friday as some other witnesses do too. Hopefully, this will keep my followers and the community up-to-update with what I've been up to. Ultimately, I hope I may gain your witness approval vote.

The template used here was devised by @jesta. And, as always, I will use the Power Up 100% option for witness updates.

Following the lead of @klye, @timcliff, @smooth, and others, set my account creation fee to 50 STEEM and SBD interest rate to 20%. Hopefully, this encourages more users to sign up as well as help to maintain the SBD strength. As there is a supermajority vote of 50 STEEM, currently when new users sign up, they will receive $5 worth of Steem Power. Not long ago, it was 10 Steem Power which amounted to $1.

2. Upcoming projects/goals

Follow up on the "Welcome to Steemit" code submission and make any changes from feedback received from review.

Continue monitoring my steemd nodes to ensure no problems with the 0.15.0 hardfork. I suspect there won't be any as there were minimal changes.

Continue with @timcliff's wish list and trying to implement some of the items there.

Continue with Steem-related web projects and have announcements and demos.

Continue being active on Steemit, Steemit Chat, and GitHub.

3. Thoughts from this week

What an interesting week!

We started with a Halloween-themed logo at the start of the week as a fun addition. Later on, we received many new UI features, like the join date on a Steemian's blog, and finally notifications just now!

There have been many thought-provoking posts from this week, here's a few:

This week also saw a continued decline of the STEEM price. However, today we saw it go up immensely! We have not seen such a rally for a really, really long time. In essence, STEEM went from $0.10 to $0.20!

I am really looking forward to seeing the Welcome page.
I've been pouring over the proposed changes presented by dan and ned and while I don't understand the economics of anything, I am concerned about the witnesses and how they plan on doing this rotation. I personally don't like the idea that my vote will expire because I have personally read up on, and vetted my witnesses, which took a significant amount of time. There's got to be a better way than what they propose.

Unless it's not the case, the witness vote will be cleared after 3 months of the vote, but this doesn't stop you from voting for the witness again. I imagine the intended goal was to have an active list of witnesses instead of those that sit at the top forever. However, someone else has said this doesn't stop the high influencers from just using an autovoter to keep their witnesses choices forever, so it might still be a popularity contestant then.

So...I put in a rather lengthy response to the Proposed changes blog by steemitblog and being that you and @timcliff are 2 witnesses that I vote for, I'm curious as to what your response is to my comment. Does it make sense? Is it a viable/acceptable idea? Does it make witnesses cringe? Will anyone see it in the nearly 400 responses? LOL